YesAllWomen – Facts The Media Didn’t Tell You

[Christina Hoff Sommers – Factual Feminist] Source: LYBIO.net
When the News of the Santa Barbara killings broke – gender activist seized on it as a teachable moment about the war on woman. They were more than a million tweets at the #YesAllWomen, or what did we learn? Coming up next on the Factual Feminist.

Now many of the activists at the #YesAllWomen insisted that no one was out to demonize men. And I’m sure that was true of many of the contributors, but consider this infographic that went viral once it was posted on Upworthy’s Tumblr.

“You say not all men are monsters?
Well imagine of bowl of M&Ms. 10% of them are poisoned.
Go ahead. Eat a handful.
After all, not all M&Ms are poison.”

Well, where to begin. First of all what is that 10% figure represent? I mean are they saying 10% of men are murderers or rapists and what’s the evidence for that?

Are they talking about all men, American men, college men, or as one blogger asked men who play ukuleles are Martian men. And by the way, I wouldn’t eat a single M&M. If I knew that 10% or 1% or 0.01% of them were poisoned.

But what’s most wrong about this graphic? Is that it deploys the classic logic of bigots. Let me think of saying well X% of African-Americans are Muslims, or Jews, or Hispanic, X% of them are dangerous and we just don’t know which ones. So therefore, let’s treat them all as suspects.

Well, congratulations Upworthy, you’ve promoted the same logical fallacy behind Jim Crow laws or racial profiling. Basically the message to women is to treat all men as if they’re poisoned. Now, I think men will be forgiven for finding the whole thing, quite insulting.

What’s most upsetting to me as the Factual Feminist is that their shooting was an occasion for instant avalanche of misinformation about women and violence.

Sarah Kliff at Vox rushed into print. Eight facts about violence against women everyone should know. Well let’s consider some of those facts.

[Factual Feminist] Source: LYBIO.net
Number one. Most women experience physical abuse in their lifetime. The most recent national survey of American women found that a slight majority 51.9% reported experienced physical violence at some point in their lives.

Well this sounds like American women are living in a state of siege. Vox does give the source, but my guess is that the author assume no one checked it out. I’m not sure she looked at herself because here is what it says. And stay with me this is a mouthful. 51.9% of surveyed women and 66.4% of surveyed men said that they were physically assaulted as a child by an adult caretaker and/or as an adult by any type of attacker. An estimated 1.9 million women and 3.2 million men are physically assaulted annually in the United States.

Also according to Vox one in ten women sustained a head or spinal injury as a result of physical assault. But if you read the study, you find that what it actually shows is that among all adult victims are physical assault who sustained an injury both male and female, one in ten sustained head and spinal cord injuries. But Vox made it sound like every woman has a 10% chance of sustaining a head or spinal injury from the physical assault.

Now the truth is bad enough, why hype it up with a misleading headline. Now, I’ve been studying research on violence against women for years and I’m sorry to report that much of it is untrustworthy. Now critics sometimes accuse me of trivializing the problem of violence against women by questioning the research.

In fact, I questioned the research because the problem of violence against women, against children, against men in the United States is just too serious to be left to advocates and careless journalists. Truth is on the side of compassion, falsehood is no friend.

I want to thank the viewers of this series for your many insightful remarks and conversations in the comment section. And please keep up the good work and if you have suggestions for further episodes let me know. And if you found this video useful please subscribe, follow me on Twitter.

Thank you for watching the Factual Feminist.

YesAllWomen – Facts The Media Didn’t Tell You. The problem of violence against women, against children, against men in the United States is just too serious to be left to advocates and careless journalists. Complete Full Transcript, Dialogue, Remarks, Saying, Quotes, Words And Text.